Thinking Outside the Synchronisation Quadrant - Kevlin Henney

[peerreynders]

aka:

The long, slow burn of gently and imperceptibly convincing imperative programmers that the actor-model is actually a good idea.

• A reworked version of his Functional C++ talk focusing on the drawbacks of threads and locks.
• Lots of great quotable programming quotes from various sources.
• Only passing reference to Erlang (and Occam) @36:38

The usual caveats:

• Virding’s First Rule of Programming in full effect @41:43
• Watching the code for the stereotypical first project of a process-based key-value store (phone_book) emerge in modern C++ @60:09 is kind of painful.

[peerreynders]

Declarative Thinking, Declarative Practice - Kevlin Henney

• Kind of a companion talk to the one above - with a little bit of an overlap around 1:05:53 but nothing too major.
• The talk explores why and how to adopt a declarative style in code and test in order to more effectively communicate intent. A large portion of the code is in Python, though Haskell has a cameo appearance, and there are smatterings of Java, C and shell script.
• Erlang code actually makes an appearance @1:14:22: “if we use something like Erlang, we can actually have a very elegant way of describing the stack just purely in functions” (running a BEAM process - it’s a bit peculiar as elements are stored in the function call stack rather than the process state).
• Overall worthwhile listening to.

[Qqwy]

Thank you for sharing these, @peerrynders! I’ve now watched the first talk. The main thing I think I’ve learned from it are some nice quotes and ways to convince people that the actor model is a better way to think about concurrency.